What is Philosophy?
Philosophy differs from many other disciplines in that there is no substantial body of material that is agreed upon by all competent practitioners of the discipline and that can therefore be taught to students in introductory courses. In philosophy, one faces controversy from the very beginning. There is not even an agreed view of what philosophy is and why it is important!
Here is the view of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), one of the most influential American philosophers of the twentieth century:
The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hand together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings,' but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be … to 'know one's way around' with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'How do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred. ("Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind", 1956)
Another view is expressed by the British philosopher and social critic, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970):
Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good. (The Problems of Philosophy, 1912)
The faculty in MU's Department of Philosophy also do not agree on what philosophy is. Here is the view of the department's chair, Professor Andrew Melnyk:
The view of philosophy that serves as a working hypothesis in my own work is this. Philosophy aims at truth. That is, like the sciences, it seeks to understand what the world is like. But it differs from the sciences in at least three ways. First, it seeks to understand the world at an extremely high level of abstraction. For example, while a psychologist might seek the neural substrate for pain, a philosopher might ask how it's possible for purely physical systems to feel sensations at all. Second, philosophy, unlike, say, biology, doesn't have a special subject-matter of its own. Instead, it's distinctive in trying to construct a comprehensive worldview—an integrated account of the whole of reality, including in particular everything distinctively human, e.g., the capacity for moral choice or for free action. Finally, although there's only one way to find out about the world—empirical investigation—the relationship between philosophizing and experimentation or observation is very much more indirect than it typically is in the sciences. Einstein's widow said that he did physics on the backs of old envelopes. Philosophy rests on empirical investigation in something like the way in which the most highly theoretical parts of science rest on empirical investigation.
Other views of philosophy from MU faculty will follow.